Stellar Poised for Lightning Network Implementation by December

Major Stellar Upgrade Set for Launch by the End of the Year

On Monday, the Stellar development team released a roadmap and technical specification for implementation of the Lightning Network. This is a technological upgrade, which allows crypto coin networks to increase their efficiency and speed. To achieve this, it is moving payments off-chain to a second-layer payment channel.

According to the developers of Stellar, their Lightning Network implementation may prove to be quite robust. In fact, they claim that they will be more robust than those created for the Bitcoin. The implementation will allow you to complete any operation you execute on Stellar such as payments, creating, deleting, or changing account permisssions within the payment channel.

What Stellar Had to Say

According to the statement from Stellar, the Stellar state channel implementation relies on the fact that each Stellar transaction specifies a source account plus a sequence number. The statement further stated,

We’ve figured out how to use those sequence numbers as a natural versioning mechanism for off-chain payments; it’s similar to how your bank gets alerted for out-of-order cheques.

Proponents of the Lightning Network forecast that in future, the technology is going to be used to allow users to trade in crypto or make transactions across blockchains. This will be achieved via a concept known as atomic swaps.

This Is Not a Surprise

The Lightning Network implementation of the Stellar network has not come entirely as a surprise. The idea of this implementation was first floated in 2015. In fact, a roadmap released by the developers of Stellar in January, stated that Lightning Network implementation was among its 2018 development goals.

No Easy Ride

The fact that developers believe that they can implement it in such a short time is impressive. It took Bitcoin quite a while to implement it, even though it had such a huge developer team. What is surprising is that Stellar developers intend to create a more robust implementation than anything Bitcoin has achieved thus far.

What is even more amazing is that it was only a week ago that Lightning Labs was able to release a beta version of the Bitcoin LN implementation. If the Stellar developers manage to pull this off, it will be astounding, to say the least.

It is also worth noting that the Lightning Network Bitcoin implementation cannot be ported to or modified for Stellar. The developers of Stellar will have to build from scratch and come up with their own version of the software.

Stellar recently enlisted the services of Bitcoin Core developer Jeremy Rubin. This could help hasten things. According to recent reports, the implementation of the Lightning Network on Stellar will get a beta release on October 1st 2018. The full release is set to take place on 1st December 2018.

What do you think about the expected release of Lightning Network implementation on Stellar? Leave us your thoughts in the comments section below.